Community and identity

I organized a women, trans, and NB event for the LGBTQ+ alumni group I’m on the board of. It was a tour of the Boston MFA focusing on women and LBGTQ themes in the museum collection. I was all dressed up in tight jeans, big boots, a flannel shirt, black eyeliner, and a lot of hair product.

I’ve been experimenting with my presentation lately, trying to reconnect to a lot of the questions about gender that I more or less packed away when I quit heroin almost 20 years ago. Basically all these things that I was trying to explore — gender, sexuality, different subcultures — seemed irrevocably intertwined with drugs. It seemed safer to just bury myself in graduate school and rediscover the joys of being a socially awkward nerd. It is maybe not a coincidence that my first serious relationship with a straight man started 5 days after the last time I got high. So 19ish years later, I’m trying to make sense of what it means to be bi and gender-nonconforming while also being a suburban mom.

So, to make a long story not so long, I was looking pretty queer.

Attendance for our event was pretty low to begin with, and then it was snowing and 3 people who had bought tickets for the tour didn’t show up. I said I would go look around for people who looked like they were looking for us, and who looked gay. I felt super awkward saying that. Like, who am I to judge who’s queer? But one of the other women on the tour just laughed and said, “No, that makes sense. I saw you waiting in the rotunda and immediately knew I was in the right place.” So, like, confirmed, I looked gay.

I had a great time on the tour. I got to ask an art history professor about intercrural sex in classical Greece. And learned that the person at the center of Gaugin’s “D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous” is thought by some art historians to be Māhū (a traditional third gender in Tahiti).

And the woman who had clocked me as queer in the rotunda is interested in getting more involved in the alumni group. So it was also productive, in a kind of retail politics way of reaching out to potential members.

But afterwards I was thinking about the distance between the part of being bi that I feel comfortable with — a deep interest in LGBTQ+ history, the joy of being recognized, the pleasure of a semi-flirtatious conversation with another queer person even when everyone knows it’s not going to go anywhere — and the problem of belonging or not belonging within a community.

Because the other thing is that there was an older butch/femme couple who seemed to be not at all interested in learning more about the alumni group or meeting the other people or even the tour — they walked away before the tour even started, even though they had bought tickets. And my immediate fear was that they were pissed off that the tour guide was a man, or that they didn’t like the cut of our jibs — 3 people in their early 30s plus me, 3 of whom were dressed in various degrees of performative gender nonconformingness, and the black femme bi woman who is the president of the alumni board. And it was such a familiar feeling — that I was being dismissed by older lesbians. I immediately felt like I was 17 again, and trying so hard to find community, and always being told in one way or another, "Come back when your 40 and still a lesbian." Which obviously didn’t happen, because I’m bi, and when I was in my early 20s I felt so viscerally that it was shape-up-or-ship-out, that I stopped trying to find a community in queer women’s spaces.

I’m sure the people who left the tour had their own things they were dealing with — as I told the president of the board, I feel like older lesbians, particularly butch/femme couples have been through so much that everyone is always already on probation. And I guess we failed whatever that test was, and they decided that wasting the money spent on the tour was better than spending another minute with us, or even saying goodbye to us.

I definitely feel like even on the alumni board, I am more of an ally than a full community member. But I’m not afraid of elbow grease, and I honestly do want to be useful, and so it’s a way of helping the community even if I feel very ambivalent about whether is it _my_ community.